Swedes Offer Bread Crumbs to Banking Recovery

The Swedes have given us much over the years. Meatball sauce, assemble-it-yourself furniture, ABBA, the safest cars on Earth, and of course, Dolph Lundgren.

But Sweden may also have a blueprint for how the U.S. can resolve the crisis in the banking and financial services industry. Sweden nationalized its banking industry in the early 1990s and emerged from the crisis four years later, having paid less than 2% of its gross-domestic product toward the crisis. The U.S. has already pledged 5% of its GDP to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and has spent far more in other programs.

It is not unheard of to nationalize companies in the U.S. One need look no further than the government-(formally) sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were taken under the protective wing of the federal government last year.

Talk has surfaced this week that the federal government is considering nationalizing the banking industry. Granted, the U.S. banking industry is considerably larger than that of Sweden. But, the federal government has taken several shots at stabilizing the banking industry, and has essentially flushed several hundred billion dollars down the toilet. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appear to be persevering under the careful eye of the federal government. Is it such a reach to assume that banks would fare just as well?

Shareholders will go crazy with the thought of their investments being wiped out, but this is a crisis that is ready to enter its second year. But how many more bad days on the stock market is it going to take to completely wipe out shareholders anyway? Bank of America Corp., for example, has lost $60 billion of market value this month. Citigroup? Down about $20 billion for the month.

Maybe it’s time for the federal government to say to the banking industry what Dolph Lundgren said to Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky IV”: “I must break you.”